Wheels coming off the (NGP) VAN?

October 5, 2023 5:46 PM

"Democrats have relied on one company’s tools to power its campaigns. They’re now facing a possible collapse." Following the 2021 purchase its parent company by a British private equity firm, the Democratic-aligned platform NGP-VAN has seen rounds of layoffs and cost-cutting that have left some activists alarmed about the future viability of the critical organizing tool. Alternatives exist, but none have NGP VAN's market share or deep integration with Democratic campaign infrastructure. Doing the Work of Democracy Despite Lousy Tech and Data: "Door-knocking is the best way to earn votes, but for all their vaunted tech savvy, Democrats’ core tools and voter data are a mess."
posted by Rhaomi (34 comments total)

As with Twitter so with VAN
posted by eustatic at 5:51 PM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

[Note that NGP VAN has been problematic at best among the activist class even before these recent developments; the GOP fundraising machine, meanwhile, risks hollowing out its own small donor base with scandalous tactics]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:52 PM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I give some money to Elizabeth Warren and Katie Porter once in a while and I have since gotten voluminous spam from NGP-VAN-affiliated candidates to the point where I have had to mark it all as spam. I can only imagine that others have had to do the same, and I wonder how this has affected overall fundraising. (Or if NGP-VAN pays Google under the table to evade their spam filters? This stuff still gets through no matter how much I flag the same source.)
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:54 PM on October 5, 2023 [21 favorites]

If anything the parties (or at least the Republicans) are upset over Google not letting them spam enough: Judge dismisses Republican lawsuit against Google over Gmail’s spam filtering / The RNC sought compensation for donor money that it says it lost as a result of Gmail’s filters, but the judge ruled in Google’s favor.
posted by Rhaomi at 6:02 PM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I want to know how much the private equity firm paid for NGP VAN. HOw much money do you need to completely undermine democratic organizing?
posted by subdee at 6:10 PM on October 5, 2023 [15 favorites]

Private equity is always bad.
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 6:19 PM on October 5, 2023 [17 favorites]

Ah, private equity. Is there nothing it can’t destroy?
posted by Warren Terra at 6:21 PM on October 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

Ah, private equity. Is there nothing it can’t destroy?

I was going to say "itself", but even then, just like Ungoliant:

"some have said that she eventually let her ever growing hunger overcome her and, in her uttermost famine, devoured herself at last."
posted by notoriety public at 6:44 PM on October 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

Saaaaaaame with the spam. It’s been constant - even with unsubscribing from each candidate as they pop up - and makes me resentful and wary of donating again. 😕
posted by web-goddess at 6:45 PM on October 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

For what it's worth, I donated to a Republican this year (Doug Burgum -- a one dollar donation got me a 20 dollar gift card), and unsubscribing, to my surprise, actually worked perfectly (so far, anyway). So I guess whatever software they use works well. Historically, I have had a hell of a time getting off Democratic party lists -- I think I may have finally put in some extremely aggressive custom mail filters blocking certain senders (ActBlue maybe? Or Action Network?), but I don't remember where or how. Possibly I am missing half of my incoming mail and just haven't noticed, but it's worth it.
posted by novalis_dt at 7:13 PM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I want to know how much the private equity firm paid for NGP VAN. HOw much money do you need to completely undermine democratic organizing?

It's a huge vulnerability to not own your own tools, here on Planet Sell-Out. Everyone has a price, so it's super-easy to destroy anything good on Earth. Just wave a big enough wad of money in someone's face, and it's yours. Then you can just sell off the pieces and shut it down, or shut it down right away if you want. This is one of the major reasons I hate the Money Game.

Anyway, I'm over here on the bench for Team Never Sell Out. It's a small bench. It's got me, the guy who protects the ironclad $1.50 price of the Costco Hot Dog Combo (with a death threat), and um... that's pretty much it for now that I know of. For people who are alive right now, anyway. :(
posted by cats are weird at 7:29 PM on October 5, 2023 [13 favorites]

Will they still text me steamy pictures of Martin Sheen and James Carville with the subject *TRIPLE MATCH ACTIVATED*?
posted by credulous at 7:37 PM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I volunteered in 2012. I was asked to visit specific homes and update their data. The data in the Van was wildly, ridiculously out of date. The last Dems in some houses had been 2 owners ago. I went to the home of a well-known Dem organizer in my area - they'd lived there for years. It's not hard to get the voting data from every single precinct in the country and then it can be added. I did about 4 - 6 hours, then bailed. it's a waste of volunteer time to gather data that way. Having accurate data is really, really important. It's embarrassing that they can't get this right.

That said, I'll be using it because Moms4Liberty[sic] have candidates for school board and Hell, No. They need to lose and lose Large. They've been trying to ban books, harassing teachers, etc.
posted by theora55 at 7:40 PM on October 5, 2023 [11 favorites]

We had a Senate candidate who got tons of donations. They hired people to visit specific voters to make sure they voted. My son's former gf lived with me 8 years previously, so someone came to make sure she voted. She lives in another state (and does vote). I don't donate because they spend donations inefficiently. I write letters, postcards, post signs, knock on doors, etc.
posted by theora55 at 7:43 PM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

HEARTBREAKING LOSS STEVIL
posted by stevil at 8:01 PM on October 5, 2023

I was using VAN 20 years ago on the Howard dean campaign and it sucked then.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:07 PM on October 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

Any party that wants community engagement with politics need only raise minimum wage, implement the four day work week, and make education free. (Bonus points if they start building houses.) But an easily manipulated working class trapped in debt and worried where their next meal or rent payment will come from appears to be what most current politicians want.
posted by krisjohn at 8:18 PM on October 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

Your political cash donation goes mostly to career political consultants, feckless B-ark party campaign committee bureaucrats, lawyers, for-profit broadcasters and the fundraising companies who are the ones soliciting you -- who all believe in their paychecks above all else.

Give your time. Give your speech. Give your vote. But when you give them money you are helping to perpetuate this.

If you still want to give political cash, give it to those making verifiable headway in the effort to pass constitutional amendments to undefine cash above $1000 as a class of free speech and abolish political rights of corporate 'persons'.
posted by zaixfeep at 9:07 PM on October 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

So fun fact. One reason Ngpvan data is so bad is because it’s not one set of data. Each party org (at various levels) using the system has their own datasets. Sometimes they share and merge data after campaigns but often they don’t. Some campaigns buy data from external brokers and merge it into their datasets so one campaign can have decent data and another campaign in an adjacent district might not. one state party org might do projects where they try to get their data in better shape but others don’t. then the state party org might be difficult about sharing data with particular campaigns in their state because they don’t want a challenger in that district. it’s a mess.

example: during the 2016 clinton campaign I did data entry to add or update info about volunteers and attendees at events directly for the clinton WA state campaign org. This included at one point updating my own data in ngpvan. A year later I was volunteering for the state party including running doorknocking events for data gathering purposes. the state party’s ngpvan data had my own record wildly wrong (like phone number I hadn’t had for more than a decade wrong). I don’t know if the clinton campaign didn’t share or the state party didn’t accept or if there are some absurd rules that make it difficult to share, but it was baffling.

so ngpvan being bad is not entirely about the company itself but also related to how party organizations and campaigns operate and work together. also recall that there are a lot of party orgs. the state of washington has a statewide one, one in each state legislature district and one for each county plus state senate and house orgs. they are all separate entities legally and while they are pretty good about sharing resources (the state party here shares their ngpvan data with local party orgs!), I don’t think is at all universal country-wide. Heck the SDCC, HDCC and DNC are all different orgs that have their own rules and do not always play nice together.


I strongly however disagree with the idea that giving money is just feeding consultants. Campaigns take money to run especially if a candidate doesn’t want to just abuse low paid staff. Contacting voters costs money and can’t all be done with volunteers if you want to do it effectively and without abusing people. There are of course campaigns I wouldn’t give money to because they aren’t going to use it well. But electoral reforms aren’t going to happen without getting good candidates into office … and they will not get into office without money.
posted by R343L at 10:24 PM on October 5, 2023 [13 favorites]

Absolutely mind-boggling that the DNC didn’t just buy NGP-VAN if it was trying to sell itself. Like…there is no justification at all not to do it. The VAN systems are the definition of the kind of systems that you would want to insource. Of course, they could also just make a new system that doesn’t suck as much.
posted by rockindata at 12:47 AM on October 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Absolutely mind-boggling that the DNC didn’t just buy NGP-VAN if it was trying to sell itself.

The DNC really doesn't have that sort of cash on hand and doesn't really have the expertise to run that sort of company either.
posted by jmauro at 3:39 AM on October 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fun fact: if you donate to mostly smaller, local candidates like folks running for school board and city council, you don't get spam.

Although one time I donated to the DSA political fund (that gets spread out among whatever candidates are nationally endorsed at the time) and I got a personal thank you email from a candidate in Colorado who was pleased that we had the same first name.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:12 AM on October 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Well, tofu is a pretty unique first name.
posted by slogger at 4:38 AM on October 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

The problems were always obvious, we broke up political machines with better tech, but did not replace patronage jobs that kept local data clean. We figured a private group would be there for us forever, and in the end set up a system where no upticket trickledown = no money for VAN downticket = no local data scrubbing. Abandonment of landlines and couch surfing economies made the data hardly worth repairing anyway. It was fun for a few years starting with Dean, then it ran into the fan blades of enshittification as it seems must.
posted by drowsy at 5:01 AM on October 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

tofu is a pretty unique first name

You OBVIOUSLY don't know a lot of democratic socialists
posted by pullayup at 5:36 AM on October 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

I'm on a local D committee and I use VAN for county and smaller races and it's okay, I guess, but very walled-garden by design and that is so grating.

Our actual contact-level experience is fairly good, probably 92% accurate, but the disconnect between VAN and the voter rolls is baffling and not transparent. I always am operating with a sense of precarity when I use their software. I don't like that.

We did have an interesting screw up during a recent update of the constituent base. Anyone who had ever been purged in the state was disappeared, even if they had a current active record. This is a lot of people to disappear. It sucks that so much damage to this resource can be caused by what, exactly? — missing parens in an SQL query?

We are living in Harry Buttle's world.
posted by Glomar response at 6:48 AM on October 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

The more I use VAN, the more I hate it. As many folks above have mentioned, the data is often useless, and sometimes it's downright hostile. A lot of this definitely falls upon the organizations using it, but the system itself is mess, too.

My two most recent good times with VAN:

-Yet another person with FIVE phone numbers, three of them out of state, that you think I should try when phone banking? Fuck off, I'm a volunteer. I'm done for the day.

-You want a list of people at a specific worksite, broken down by whether or not they're in the union? Great, here's a list of literally twice the number of people employed there, most of whom are long gone and some of whom have job titles that literally cannot exist here, and whose union status is marked (if at all) by, say, a note from 2009 saying "signed card". What kind of card? An authorization card? A union card? A pledge card for something else? This sure is a fantastic way to track organizing efforts!


Like seemingly everything else in this rotting country, whenever this particular shitty thing falls apart, it's bound to be replaced by something shittier, if it's even replaced at all.
posted by heteronym at 6:55 AM on October 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think I may have finally put in some extremely aggressive custom mail filters blocking certain senders (ActBlue maybe? Or Action Network?)

I have everything that has the word "unsubscribe" sending to a folder and marked as read.
posted by joannemerriam at 9:30 AM on October 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Jesus, the data was so walled-off even with access up until now, I can't imagine what it will be like going forward. I'd wound up writing a Python script to parse their PDF output because that was the one way to get data on demand without having to get approvals from the chain.
posted by yerfatma at 10:55 AM on October 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Articles like these are so important. Journalism is good.
posted by latkes at 11:12 AM on October 6, 2023

lol, yerfatma, I have a custom, easy-to-parse report format and use Tabula.
posted by Glomar response at 1:21 PM on October 6, 2023

I used Nationbuilder for my 2017/19 campaigns because I could build my own dataset. VAN was clunky at best, and I hated it. No one wanted to consider NB because they worked with the enemy. e.g. would support any party's candidate.
posted by daHIFI at 6:14 PM on October 7, 2023

Amending my earlier comment here: I can get behind cash donations to local candidates and issues -- the smaller and more local, the better.
posted by zaixfeep at 5:44 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I seem to recall coming across the profile of a Spanish-speaking person named 'Tofu' a while back.

IIRC they declared their pronoun was 'soy'.
posted by zaixfeep at 5:48 PM on October 8, 2023